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A Ferry Loop Plan To Connect the Dots For New York Bay

From Boston to Seattle to San Diego, maritime cities across the country have embraced ferries as an inexpensive and people-pleasing way to ease congestion, spur waterfront revitalization and stitch together far-flung communities snubbed by other forms of mass transit.

Now a coalition of ferry advocates in New York and New Jersey has quietly put together a proposal for an ambitious, 25-stop ferry loop for Upper New York Bay, one that would link Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn and New Jersey with a fleet of 99-passenger vessels.

In the proposal it will make public next week, the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, a year-old civic and planning organization set up to promote waterfront recreation and economic development projects, maps out a ferry loop crisscrossing New York Harbor. The plan seeks to revive the glory days of trans-harbor travel, when 112 steamer and ferry routes traversed the upper and lower bay, linking towns and cities from Coney Island to the Jersey Shore.

The plan depends on a private operator's willingness to run it, and almost certainly on some public subsidy to start and perhaps to maintain it. Neither is assured, and there is no guarantee the plan will ever come to fruition. But similar operations have sprouted around the country in recent years. And in a region where it can take two hours to reach Jersey City from Red Hook, Brooklyn -- places separated by just three miles of water -- the plan offers the hope of saving travel time, increasing cross-harbor commerce, and opening job opportunities for people across the region. Beyond that, its promoters have a loftier goal: to inspire local officials to think of their shared waterway as a freeway that unites communities, not a watery void that sets them apart.

''In looking around the harbor, we saw this extraordinary collection of parks, cultural institutions and commercial nodes virtually unreachable from one another,'' said Carter Craft, project director of the alliance. ''We have a free highway right on our doorstep but until now, it's been largely abandoned.''

The group envisions a privately run system of eight boats that would make 25 stops around Upper New York Bay. Launching every 20 minutes on weekdays and using Battery Park and the World Financial Center as end points, the $18.5 million service would move clockwise and counterclockwise around the harbor and connect mid-route with the Staten Island Ferry, which would serve as an express run to Lower Manhattan. The average ride between stops would be about seven minutes. The one-way fare would be $3.

Supporters of the idea, including the National Park Service, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Howard Golden, the Brooklyn borough president, say a comprehensive ferry system would help to revitalize vacant waterfront property, reduce the dependency on private cars and lure tourists to attractions that are, for now, largely inaccessible by public transportation.

Private ferry operators said they welcomed the idea but expressed caution, saying public subsidies might be required to sustain the loop in its early years. ''It's very forward thinking and perhaps a bit rosy in its projections but then again transportation professionals thought we were crazy when we started up 15 years ago,'' said Arthur Imperatore Jr., president of New York Waterway, whose nine Hudson and East River routes now carry 32,000 passengers a day, up from 18,000 five years ago.

And recent history gives reason for both optimism and concern. While two dozen ferry routes have begun since 1986, low ridership has forced operators to discontinue more than half of them, including a Queens-to-Midtown Manhattan link that New York Waterway plans to abandon next month and the Delta Air Lines LaGuardia Airport water taxi, which made its last run in December.

Despite obstacles that include a historically tempestuous relationship between New York and New Jersey, the plan's boosters say there is an untapped market for nautical transit. According to their projections, the system, which would cost $5 million a year to operate, could be up and running in a year. Local transportation agencies, they said, could use loans from the federal Department of Transportation to buy boats, which would then be leased to private operators. Many of the 15 landings that do not yet exist would be created with floating barges, at a cost of $5 million.

''This is not like building a Second Avenue subway,'' Mr. Craft said.

Ultimately, he and others say, the service could carry as many as 12,000 passengers a day. Ideally, they said, ferry travel would become part of a regional fare-collection system, similar to E-ZPass, that would allow easy transfers among boats, buses, trains and subways.

The harbor loop seeks to capitalize on the growing popularity of ferries in both New York and in coastal cities around the world. In addition to the Staten Island Ferry, which transports 63,000 people a day, five private ferry operators carry passengers in the metropolitan area. In 1985, there were none.

Ferries have also made a comeback in Boston, which now has 10 commuter routes supported by $5 million in subsidies, and San Francisco, which has 7 lines and plans for 35 more, part of a proposed system that would be run by a newly established Bay Area Water Transit Authority. With 27 routes and 25 million passengers a year, Washington State's publicly run ferry service is the largest in the nation.

In 1910, before bridges and tunnels knit together the region's patchwork of islands and peninsulas, New York harbor buzzed with ferries and steamers. But with traffic clotted and the prospect of new bridge and tunnel construction unlikely, many transportation planners see ferries as part of a solution to the region's congestion woes.

''They're the only form of urban transportation that has actually gotten faster in the last generation,'' said Alan Olmsted, director of private ferry service for the New York City Transportation Department. New watercraft, he said, can travel at 52 miles an hour, more than twice as fast as the older class of vessels.

Except for the Staten Island Ferry, a free ride that costs the city $100 million a year, none of the harbor's ferry operators receive public subsidies, although the Transportation Department has been spending millions of dollars to upgrade private ferry landings. Mr. Olmsted reacted positively to the loop idea but he said he had not seen the proposal and could not comment on its feasibility.

Citing the proliferation of waterfront construction in both states, urban planners and real-estate executives agree that alternatives to roads are needed. ''We have 11,000 new apartments and 10.8 million square feet of office space coming to Hudson County waterfront,'' said Ciorsdan Conran, executive director of the Hudson River Property Owners and Conservators Association. ''Are all those people going to jump into their car? It would be wonderful if they could leave their cars and hop on a ferry.''

But more than just a pressure valve for congestion, some see ferry service as a way to jump-start development in places that have been shunned by investors, largely because they lack public transportation. Regional planning experts estimate that 700 acres of waterfront await redevelopment, including much of Governors Island, Staten Island's Homeport and Military Ocean Terminal, a 327-acre pier in Bayonne that is the region's largest chunk of fallow waterfront. All three sites would be served by the harbor loop.

Though it is hardly more than a stone's throw from Wall Street, the once-booming piers along Red Hook in Brooklyn remain a desolate landscape. Teresa Williams, executive director of Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation, said two proposed ferry landings in the neighborhood might help draw companies and employees now repelled by the idea of working in place so removed from the rest of the city. ''It now takes longer to get from Manhattan to Red Hook than it does to get to Philadelphia,'' said Ms. Williams, whose group has already lured 1,100 companies and 23,000 workers to the piers and warehouses of southwest Brooklyn, most of them in Sunset Park, a neighborhood served by bus, subway and a 10-minute ferry ride to Lower Manhattan.

With seven stops in Brooklyn, the loop would also knit together waterfront neighborhoods that are now disconnected from one another. A number of parks and recreation areas around the harbor also stand to benefit from the service, which would feature a so-called cultural loop on weekends. The 15 stops include a new golf course in Bayonne, Sailors Snug Harbor cultural center on Staten Island and Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The National Park Service, which manages a half-dozen local waterfront sites, is supporting the plan as a way to entice more visitors to its more isolated parks and monuments.

Private ferry operators and transportation consultants, however, warn that without subsidies, fares would exceed $3 and reduce the appeal to middle-class commuters. At worst, they say, the failure to obtain government support would doom the project.

John Koenig, president of New York Fast Ferry, which runs high-speed catamarans between Manhattan and Monmouth County, N.J., said most other cities either operated their own ferry service or provided sizable subsidies. ''It's tough to compete with buses and trains, which receive billions in subsidies,'' he said.

Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society, which provided office space for the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, likened the bay to Times Square, a crossroads. ''The harbor is the crossroads of our entire region,'' he said. ''This vast metropolis was born from the water but then we turned our backs and became estranged from it,'' he said. ''This is a chance to embrace the water. It's an enormous opportunity, but one that might not be around for very long.''